Affective Robot Enabled Capacity and Quality Improvement of Nursing Home Aged Care Services in Australia

Abstract

Australia like most of the western world is bracing up for the looming ageing population crisis. Assistive robots are being seen as one of the ways for supporting aged care facilities building capacity and improving the quality of care of the elderly. In this paper, the authors report on three field trials of Matilda, a human like affective communication (service and companion) robot in nursing homes in Australia. The work demonstrates Matilda's ability to break technology barriers with the elderly, support nursing homes in group and one to one activities with elderly to help increase capacity of care as well as improve emotional well being of elderly to improve quality of care.